I don’t care one way or the other about the gay marriage debate, for the simple reason that I’ve never been convinced it is the job of the state to sanction marriages.
So you won’t be surprised that I find Steve Chapman’s column about de facto polygamy rather persuasive.
When it comes to sexual relationships and cohabitation among consenting adults, Utah takes a permissive approach. If a guy wants to shack up with a lady, that’s fine. If he wants to shack up with several, no problem. He can father children by different roommates, with no fear of the law. But if he marries one woman and represents three others as his “spiritual wives,” like Kody Brown? Then he’s committed a felony. Not because of the stuff that goes on behind closed doors. It’s the public act of claiming to be part of a lifelong “plural marriage” that raises the specter of jail. …So Brown went to court claiming that his constitutional rights have been violated in various ways. Though it may come as a surprise to hear, he’s got a perfectly reasonable argument. Brown and his lawyer, George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley, don’t say the state must sanction such arrangements in law. Nor did Brown try to get multiple marriage licenses, in defiance of the state ban on polygamy. His case is about freedom, not state recognition. Unlike gay couples who say they should be allowed to legally wed, Brown isn’t asking the state to officially accommodate his chosen form of matrimony. He’s just asking to be let the hell alone. Other people, after all, are exempt from such control. Turley says Brown and his women “would not be prosecuted if they claimed no religious obligation and merely had casual or purely sexual associations.” He notes, “Monogamists are allowed an infinite number of sexual partners, and consequently have the right to bear children with multiple partners, so long as they do not claim to be committed to such partners in a union or family.” The law doesn’t prevent any man from living with several women, having sex with them and siring their offspring. This behavior is a problem only when a man claims to be permanently wedded to the women — only, that is, when he behaves more responsibly than a tomcat. …If Brown wants to live with five women and call them his girlfriends, his shorties, his harem, the Seattle Storm or the 101st Airborne, it is of no earthly concern to the rest of us. And if he wants to call them his wives, the state of Utah should say, “Knock yourself out, dude.” That, or nothing.
I will admit that I don’t like the idea of children being born into that situation, but I’m also not happy about children being born to single mothers. What really matters, though, is that I certainly wouldn’t want the government to interfere in such matters, absent real proof of abuse.
[…] Since I’m a bit old-fashioned, I think polygamy is rather weird. […]
[…] Since I’m a bit old-fashioned, I think polygamy is rather weird. […]
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[…] what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s a role of government to sanction any kind of marriage (or to persecute people based on their beliefs), so I definitely think this issue is a […]
[…] I’ve already written that polygamy – regardless of how weird it is – is not something that demands government […]
[…] I’ve already written that polygamy – regardless of how weird it is – is not something that demands […]
Again, you can make the “rules to live in society argument” to justify almost incursion into people’s affairs. When Bob the plumber sleeps with Lou the blacksmith’s wife, Lou tends to get pissed off and do stupid things, like, perhaps, killing Bob. This action has multiple effects: it deprives the community of a plumber and a blacksmith; it forces Lou’s wife to raise her children without their father; it forces Lou’s children to grow up without a father; those fatherless children are more likely to engage in criminal behavior than children raised in a two-parent home (some studies assert); those criminal children will eventually cost the society money both in terms of loss wealth and production but also in terms of the cost of keeping them in prison, the court costs, etc. Therefore, it is in the greater good for government to outlaw adultery; at least that way society loses only Bob the plumber and Lou’s loose wife. Or maybe only men should go to prison for adultery since it’s in society’s good to have Lou’s loose wife stay with the children.
Shoot, for that matter, some research asserts that children raised by an at-home mother do better than children raised by day-care centers, so perhaps for the good of all we should legally forbid mothers to work.
You have a right to swing your fist; that swinging fist ends at my nose. I don’t have a right to insist that you stop swinging your fist because it might set up a breeze that eventually causes a typhoon in Japan. That kind of thinking is what has brought us the nanny state we have today. IMHO
The morality, or immorality, of plural marriage troubles me not at all. On an individual basis, I really don’t care who marries whom or how many, sometimes a little socially sanctioned variety sounds nice. My concern is for the larger good, the “rule” variety of utilitarianism.
Polyandrous societies don’t exist because of human nature. A rich successful woman will not marry more than one man, at least not very often, because more than one man won’t marry her; men are much less inclined to share their women than vice-versa. To deny that is to deny human nature, denying human nature is one of the main mistakes that the idiot communists made. They thought that human nature doesn’t exist and humans could be molded into whatever they wanted them to be. Didn’t work out so well.
I would posit that history shows that plural marriage societies can’t stand against monogamous societies. Monogamous ones are more stable and have better, stronger underpinnings. Lou the blacksmith who gets laid once a week is better at his job and harder working than Lou the blacksmith who sees the rich guys get all the chicks and he gets, well, Rosie. One of the primary reasons we don’t have totalitarian, patriarchal societies, or at least not to the extent we did, is because of legally enforced monogamy.
Fifty different laboratories sounds like a singularly poor idea to me, “I’m married to these three chicks in California but not in Oregon.” Or the full faith and credit clause means that I am, but you can’t be until you move to CA.
As I said, I’m all for personal freedom, but we are social animals, we have to live together, and, like it or not, we have to have rules. Not wanting to pay the tire disposal fee does not allow me to burn tires in my back yard and if I run a metal plating shop, I’m not allowed to dump the sodium cyanide in the street. A no rules society is an anarcho-libertarian fantasy world with no attachment to reality, it’s wishing away gravity, it’s a waste of glucose, and in the end it’s kind of pathetic.
@P.K. Jail may be a little harsh, but since we’ve decided that social shaming is not an acceptable sanction any longer . . .
BTW-I have no problem with gay marriage, but the same rule applies to them, too.
@Gottathinkfirst: this is the same argument used for income redistribution by the government. If people in the bottom tier do not have enough to get by on, they will become restless and unruly and eventually cause problems. In the old days, we could count on wars in which low-income males would be your basic cannon fodder, and on incredibly harsh (to us) laws that would impose the death penalty for theft, or at least transportation. Today we don’t have such laws, and we have an all-volunteer army; therefore, we must take money from the income producers and hand it over to the shiftless in order to preserve, well, order.
I don’t buy it. In the first place, many of the cultures in which polygamy was and is practices have limited if any rights for women, which explains why polyandrous relationships are non-existent. We don’t live in one of those countries. A rich and successful woman, and there are many, could easily marry more than one man without a legal or religious sanction (assuming the laws in the U.S. against polygamy were dropped). Furthermore, the law would sanction those who tried to force people into marriages which they don’t want, particularly children, because we already have laws against child abuse.
In the second place, I see no place in the Constitution where the federal government is given the power to set rules about marriage, and yet the federal government insisted that Utah outlaw polygamy before it be allowed into the union as a state. Why not let individual states decide? You know, 50 different laboratories?
But refusing to allow people to exercise their rights because polygamy as practiced by totalitarian, patriarchal societies was bad is just wrong.
Indeed, women who would prefer a polygynous relationship of their own volition must be prevented from doing so at all costs. If jail is what it takes, so be it.
What’s the minority going to do anyway. Look what happened to Jesus when the majority found him disagreeable.
Maximizing personal freedom is great, but, like all freedoms there’s a limit. And there is a glaring, practical problem with widely practiced, socially acceptable polygamy that has nothing to do with morals and religion, it has to do with math and reproductive ratios. First, consider that polygamous societies, in all but one or two *possible* cases, manifest themselves as polygynous, not polyandrous. Second, there is a roughly equal proportion of males and females born in any normally reproducing population. It’s actually about 1.05:1 male:female, with boys having slightly higher infant mortality. By the time a given cohort matures, there’s one male for each female (sorry, Surf City with its “two girls for every boy” doesn’t exist.) So, imagine that polygamy is legalized and becomes widespread. While we’re at it we remember that, like it or not, women gravitate toward status, I mean, have you seen the talent that Rod Stewart gets? If each higher status man takes just two wives, that leaves the bottom 50% of men without mates. Guys without mates are notoriously grouchy. In older societies they would have a war to solve this problem. They’d go to another society, kill off a few of their grouches in battle, pillage the place if they won, and carry off their men as slaves and their women as wives. The formerly wifeless are less grouchy because they’re getting some and they can just kill the slaves if they get mouthy. Polygamy laws may seem like a case of the state needlessly infringing on personal rights, but I don’t think that they are. This really is a cornerstone of civilization.
RKae, the logical conclusion of your argument is slavery. Should alcohol also be banned? You say “Societies have the right to protect themselves against corrosive ideas”. Exactly who is “society”? The majority? Is the majority infallible? Do you know that polygamy has actually been the norm in most societies before Christianity became more dominant? You are making the exact arguments those uncivilized Arabs make to enforce Sharia Law and oppress women.
@RKae: are you talking polygamy in a society in which polygamy is NOT illegal?
Polygamy is poison to civilization. I’ve seen it in my own family, and every excuse for it is a blatant lie. It fosters nothing positive, as polygamists claim; it only destroys. Polygamists are propagandists and pathological liars. There’s real insanity there.
But should the government have a say? Yes. There’s a difference between freedom and a free-for-all. There needs to be a culture. There needs to be a standard, and in any cultural structure someone is going to be told, “No, you may not do that.” It’s not oppression.
Societies have the right to protect themselves against corrosive ideas, and there are few ideas more corrosive than polygamy.
However if you checked more than one spouse in box 6c then use column 5 to compute your tax. If you checked no spouse on box 6c then multiply your tax by 1.25…
And not just “cohabiation,” but cohabitation, too. Sorry.
An adult should be able to pursue love, sex, cohabiation, and marriage with any consenting adults.
I for one have never had a problem with a man having more than one wife at a time. If you have the intestinel foritude for more than one, go for it.
That being said, another question comes to mind. The US court system is hell bent on allowing sharia law to be allowed in the USA , sharia law advocates mutiple wives as does the Morman religion. This should prove interesting in the long term for the legal minds that are presently in denial.
I’m with Paul.
The old argument that the state has a compelling interest in having people get married, as a reason for state sanction of marriage, is outdated at best. Now, the only reason the state has an interest in marriage at all is so that it can get more in taxes than it could from two unmarried people.
The solution to the polygamy and gay marriage issues is the same one–get the government out of the marriage business. If we must have an income tax, people should be taxed on their individual income no matter wha their living circumstances. Marriage should be left to the church or whatever, and issues like insurance or who gets to visit me in the hospital should be handled through contracts, living wills, negotiations, etc. IMHO.